Posted
by
timothyon Monday October 07, 2002 @01:01PM
from the delightfully-free-of-tourists dept.

theBrownfury writes "BBC, Sydney Herald, and the Indian Express are reporting a new object, which is one-tenth the diameter of the Earth, and lies well beyond Pluto in an area of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. The new world, which has been dubbed Quaoar, is about 1,280 kilometres (800 miles) across. Quaoar orbits the sun ever 288 years and is 1250 Km wide, about the size of all the asteroids combined. This discovery is being hailed as the most important solar system discovery in the past 72 years."

It may make sense. Some good years ago, Dr. Van Flandern published several weird ideas about our solar system. He mentioned that some weirdnesses seen on certain asteroids pointed to the fact that they could have satellites. He was demonished for this theory but Galileo probe did find such an asteroid in its way to Jupiter. Sincerly, Pluto is too big for an asteroid and too small for a true planet. But still no one real could classify the real edge between planets and small bodies... So I wouldn't be admired to see this new object also bouncing between both terms.

For UFO manhunters/bashers: note that VF was once the director of the U.S. Naval Astronomy, and one of the guys who help find Charon. Since Richard Hoagland started to search for hyperpyramids in the closet, he suffered some bad publicity, but still, his researches are quite important because they are in the edge of Science and some have had positive results recently.

Yeah, they're still trying to decided if Pluto is a planet. Really, though, it's a matter of semantics. Either way, it's a big rock that circles the sun. That can be said about a few of the other planets.

Did a little Googling, found the following definition of Quaoar. Don't know if it's real or not. *shrug*

Quaoar: Their only god who "came down from heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, out the world on the back of seven giants. He then created the lower animals," and then mankind. Los Angeles County Indians, California

Everybody knows that the planets are supposed to be named after the Roman gods. That's just the way it is. Here's a list of some of the more common Roman gods [hypermart.net]. I'm sure some of the Hercules and Xena fans out there can add to this list.

Personally, I like:

Minerva, better known by her greek name as Athena. Just because it sounds cool. She sounds like she might be a hottie, too.

Somnus, the god of sleep. Because of course a planet that far away from the sun must be asleep.

Here is a link to the Quaoar FAQ [caltech.edu], maintained by Chad Truijillo, one of the planet's co-discoverers. There's a lot of cool stuff there, including the discovery images (animated so you can see it moving across the star field), the Hubble images, information about the orbit, etc.

This main belt asteroid is approx 52 km in diameter and was discoveredby M Wolf at Heidelberg in 1895. This first determination of the spin period was made from 6 nights ofobservations (by Col Bembrick) over a time span of 6 weeks, representing 58 rotations of the asteroid.The large amplitude of the light curve approx 0.4 magnitudes implies a considerable irregularity in theshape of this asteroid.

Personally I would think Minerva would be a better fit being a Roman goddess, but that's an asteroid too.

Sorry folks, its just some bird crap on the telescope. No self-respect 21st century discovered planet would follow an orbit proposed in a dark old century where people who lived on a flat Earth in a geocentric solar^H^H^H^H^H geo system.

Feh. Astrology accounted for Chiron when it was discovered back in the seventies. For that matter, astrology accounted for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto after their respective discoveries. Whether you believe in astrology or not, you can count on people writing papers and books to describe what effects Quaoam (or Qualcomm, or whatever. . . damn, what a forgettable name for a planet) will have on their personal lives.

. ..or maybe astrology won't account for it. Most astrologers still don't account for precession of the earth's axis and the presence of Ophiucus in the Zodiac. . . so ya never know.

The names were not chosen randomly, even from within the Roman list. Mercury(the messenger) was named for its speed(88-day orbit), Venus(goddess of love) for its beauty, Mars(war) for its blood red color.
Jupiter(Zeus) was the ruler of the universe and the brightest of the nighttime planets. Cronus(Saturn) was Zeus' father & former master of the universe, until Zeus overthrew him. When Uranus was discovered in the 18th century, it was named for Cronus' father, the original lord of the universe(Jupiter is brighter than Saturn is brighter than Uranus). Neptune, in the 19th century, was named for the god of the ocean because of its deep blue color.

Pluto was so named for two reasons. 1) To honor Percival Lowell, whose initials are the first two letters of the name. 2) Pluto(Hades) was god of the dead, and the astronomers knew that the new planet must have a very bleak, desolate, Hades-like environment. (Well, as Hades-like as anything 400 degrees below freezing can be;-).

So, IMHO, when they name it, planet or not, the name should be appropriate, i.e. not Artemis!;-).

- Varuna was discovered in 2000 and measures 1,000 kilometers in diameter.- Ixion was discovered in 2001 and is thought to be of similar size as Quaoar and Varuna.-.. and Quaoar itself has actually been imaged in 1982 - 2001 but not detected as a planet until now. How embarassing.:-)

Here's a link to a nice graphic comparing the sizes of Pluto-Charon to numerous Kuiper objects. (BTW, the graphic doesn't yet show Ixion, but the prior poster already mentioned that it's roughly the size of Varuna.)

Its amazing to see that at least 8 good sized Kuiper objects have been found since 1995, with three big ones (Varuna, Ixion, and Quaoar) being discovered in the last three years. It makes you wonder how many more objects we'll find in the next few years.

It's not just the larger asteroids that have names, and they're certainly not all from ancient mythology. Check out this list of minor planetary bodies [harvard.edu]. It's a long read, but there are some real gems. Lots of dead Greeks, of course, masters of dusty literature, music, science, etc. Seems like almost every city, state, and country has a minor planet named for it. Those who don't can be content to be represented by (6000) United Nations.

Perhaps most apropos to note in this forum are asteroids (9965) GNU, (9885) Linux, (9793) Torvalds and (9882) Stallman (all spotted and named by the Kitt Peak Spacewatch crew [arizona.edu]).

Too many cool ones to list all at once, but I have to mention (8147) Colemanhawkins, and (6318) Cronkite. There's the trio of (5048) Moriarty, (5049) Sherlock and (5050) Doctorwatson, followed by (5051) Ralph.